The latest developments in Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) are expected to lead to a transformation of future production systems’ capabilities and productivity. While increased human-robot collaboration as well as higher degrees of autonomous systems within a manufacturing context will be essential to achieve the next breakthrough in both agility as well as productivity, they will pose significant new challenges for how production systems are planned and engineered to maximise the potential and minimise the risks of this new technology for manufacturing businesses. Therefore, a main focus of this review was on determining the critical success factors for the implementation of RAS and on gaining a deeper understanding of the current research focus. The research results lead to a broader discussion of the implications arising from future automation and human-robot collaboration which highlights the current limitation of decision making criteria considered in the current literature. The results of the review have been quantitatively verified with the use of the text mining tool WordSmith Tool (v7.0).

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This is a conference paper http://www.icmr.org.uk/.

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The authors acknowledge support from the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Intelligent Automation in undertaking this research work under grant reference number EP/IO33467/1.